Three nightmares and two scenes from life
1. Theater of cruelty
High in the lifeguard chair the director grows precariously tall,
shouting through his megaphone—
it’s you. We’re playing Hamlet in an Olympic swimming pool
without an audience.
Mattresses float, roped together in the foreground
(someone pretends to sleep)
an alarm clock hammers into bells; the narrator springs forward
like a sprung trap—it’s me,
on one of the mattress rafts, ready to set the scene
for tragedy, my parts
in this one even rhyme (someone floating face-down
in the background)
and you above us resetting the clock over and over
because you can.
2. That one summer
we stayed up late talking stars, you and me
and the astronomer
those nights you slept in the living room
She was young
everything impressed her equally
(especially you)
she didn’t know that you were laughing at her
Midwestern ideas
My room was inside your room so you said
isn’t it time
for you to go to bed? I thought past time
put some music on and
couldn’t tell if the walls of my room
were shrinking
towards me or filling with water or filling
with dirt
3. The typewriter
After sex (terrible even in dreams) I went looking for your typewriter
in the closet
which was long like the old cloakrooms in elementary school
30 hooks lined up
at reach-for level on the wall and kids lined up (either alphabetically or
according to height)
to be counted before lunch. When my mother went to college
freshmen girls still lined up
naked and posed for posture-checking photographs during orientation
like Tereza’s nightmare.
Your dorm room was an open field (with a mattress on the floor somewhere)
and in the closet
there weren’t so many hooks but there were boxes to look inside of
and two typewriters.
Half naked, stooped over, searching, I found the broken
one first, had to find
the good one before you got out of the shower. I said you smell good.
You caught me—balanced
something heavy on my back. I turned, it fell and you were yelling
how could you be so stupid
to think I wanted you and other words, too,
but everything was these words.
4. Hotel
We had to share our room with thirty other women
you’d been sleeping with
not a room, really, but a kind of suite crammed full
with rundown furniture
The women wandering half-dressed between the beds
and rooms were difficult
to count and their faces could change like television channels
change constantly
filling the room with a strange unsteady glow and laughter, too
hidden in every corner
5. The joke
At least once you came to me at night
in the body
of someone I loved more recently
or not yet,
but I wasn’t fooled, wasn’t surprised.
Your changes
don’t surprise me. In your room
you nailed up
one blank white mask that shook
its head no
when the fan was on.
Elizabeth Gross |
levelheaded: Three nightmares and two scenes from life
By opening with the recollection of a nightmare in which the narrator sets “the scene / for tragedy,” Elizabeth Gross’s poem itself is steered toward an unhappy ending. The first section offers vivid details of a bizarre production of “Hamlet in an Olympic swimming pool / without an audience.” Most noteworthy, however, is the relationship revealed between the speaker and “you”—a person who holds special power, the ability to reset “the clock over and over” in a physical setting where humans don’t exactly seem to thrive, clinging to rafts in water with “someone floating face-down / in the background.”
Check out the shift in verb tense in section two. Time dictated by someone else, we are transported from the present into a recollection of the past. This shift doesn’t seem random, especially given Gross’s decision to italicize “past time” at the end of a line. Again, this relationship between the speaker and “you” seems especially significant in the context of a physical place—“My room was inside your room.” The imbalance of power between the poem’s “I” and its “you” is further demonstrated as the speaker recalls that she “couldn’t tell if the walls of my room / were shrinking // towards me or filling with water or filling / with dirt.”
The world seems to be closing in on the speaker. In section three, though she recalls that “Your dorm room was an open field,” she was physically confined to the elementary school-esque closet therein. The discomforting memory of her mother and other female college students posing nude for “posture-checking photographs during orientation” is echoed in the humility experienced by the speaker who was stupid enough to think herself desired.
It’s difficult to distinguish which of these scenes are nightmares, and which are drawn from real life. This seems to be at least part of the point here—to convey that, for the speaker of this poem, life can be nightmarish, and dreams can be life-like. The woman who is confined and inadequate in some settings finds herself in a “kind of suite crammed full / with rundown furniture” together with “you” and “thirty other women / you’d been sleeping with” in another.
By the poem’s end, in the context of her relationship with “you,” the narrator interprets any brush with love as little more than pretense. The “you” who once had directorial control is reduced to simply acting. Yet, like a ghost, like a heart-wrenching tragedy, through his final act, this actor and the mask he hangs exhibit a haunting power to deny, and a haunting power to move.
– The Editors